Sid Meier said (perhaps apocryphally) that "a game is a series of interesting choices." I'm not sure that's meant to be universally applied, but I do think it can often help explain what makes a good game appealing. And that's certainly the case here: Race for the Galaxy is a very entertaining game because it packs a lot of interesting decision-making in a small, elegant package. You make more choices which are more compelling in a thirty-minute game of Race than you do in an hour or two of many popular eurogames.

Race for the Galaxy is a specialized card game: all players draw cards from a single deck of mostly-unique cards with different powers and point values. They play some of these cards to their tableau to build their galactic empire, and try to score higher than their opponents by playing higher-value cards, running their empire's economy to earn more points, or a combination of both.

During the course of the game, players are constantly reevaluating their hands and tableaus, trying to figure out how to make everything work to their best advantage. There are a few core game mechanics that I think fundamentally make Race the well-oiled machine that it is. A close look at these will likely go a long way to explaining why Race is so appealing to so many. (I don't intend for this to provide a complete overview of the rules--others have certainly done a better job of that than I ever could.)

The first such mechanic is the simultaneous phase selection. On each turn, each player will choose a specific phase that should occur: exploring the galaxy, developing their civilization, settling planets, trading and consuming goods, and producing goods. After all players have made revealed their choice, only the selected phases will occur this turn.

There are many factors to consider when you select a phase: what do you want to accomplish right now? What will contribute most to your long-term goals? Who else will benefit from the phase that you choose? What phases are your opponents likely to select? Can you take advantage of those selections to choose a phase that provides more marginal benefit to yourself?

So, right at the beginning of the turn, players are making a major decision about how they want to play their hand in the short term. In extreme cases, just one phase selection can determine the winner of a game, or put a player off pace with their opponents. But even when the effects are not so obvious, phase selection goes a long way to shaping the course of the game. Because you cannot control your opponents' hands or tableaus, the phase selection represents your best chance to gain a competitive advantage. Those who describe this game as "multiplayer solitaire" probably haven't had the opportunity to explore the rich and varied metagame available through this mechanic. It's not multiplayer solitaire if my opponent and I are staring each other down across the table, searching for any clue to suggest what phase the other will call.

Another mechanic that provides for interesting decisions is the way cards in your hand are used as currency. If you want to build a development or settle a planet, you'll usually have to discard other cards--other developments and planets--from your hand. As a result, a hand of five cards might present opportunities to pursue several different strategies, but odds are you'll only be able to pay for one of them.

In many games, you choose a strategy to follow early on, and work to execute it over the course of the game. Switching gears might be completely impractical, or at least difficult to justify absent exceptional circumstances. Effective play in Race requires more fluid thinking. You must constantly reevaluate your tactical and strategic options based on the cards available to you in your hand. A play that seemed worthwhile at the start of the turn can morph into a bad idea after the first phase is finished. A particular strategy suggested by your hand may seem unlikely or off-the-wall--but if it's the one strategy you can coherently execute, better to do that than wait passively for fate to offer you an alternative while your opponents grow stronger.

Other elements of the game work to support this constant decision-making, even if they don't cause it directly. Simultaneous play is one of these. It simply makes the game go faster, meaning that you're spending more time considering your options and less time waiting for your opponent to do something. I'll even argue that the controversial iconography contributes a lot to this streamlining, too. The differences between certain cards can be somewhat subtle, and the icons help make those distinctions very easy to see. Once you learn them, you can quickly thumb through your entire hand and understand the options you have, instead of taking more time to skim text. It is unfortunate that the icons make the game less accessible at first, but I believe it was a worthwhile trade-off to preserve the game's lasting appeal.

There are a lot of nice qualities about Race. It's pretty portable: you can play with just the deck of cards and some way of keeping track of victory points earned through commerce (I've used 20-sided dice). It doesn't need too much table space, although having more helps. The half-hour it takes lets you play a meaty game at times when you wouldn't be able to undertake one of the more popular choices, like Agricola. On the flip side, if you have the time, it also lends itself well to marathon sessions. It's well-designed: there's no card in the deck that I would flatly refuse to play (although a few of them require, um, very specific circumstances). And I'm sure I'm not the only geek who digs the sci-fi theme.

But the constant barrage of interesting decisions is what makes Race a great game, and my personal favorite. In one sense, the game is a pure luck-fest: your choices are always constrained by a random draw of cards. And to be fair, I think this randomness has a little more influence on the game's outcomes than its staunchest proponents will admit. Against equally-skilled opponents, sometimes, the deck decides the winner--it's infrequent, but it happens. But the rest of the time, Race offers you many options for building order from chaos. Doing so effectively is fun and rewarding, even after a hundred plays, whether or not you win. If you like games with a lot of strategic choices, you owe it to yourself to check out Race for the Galaxy. I can't guarantee that you'll like it--but if you do, I think you'll find a uniquely enjoyable game, where the time and money involved is well-spent.

How was your time with learning the icons though? Did you pick it up quick or did it take a few games for it to click.

Both? I felt like I did okay on the first game, but I think it took about three games or so before I was really comfortable with them. But since the games go so quickly, that didn't seem like a major drag. It also helped that my partner and I were learning the game together, so I was never in a situation where I was struggling to learn while others blew past me.

I recognize that the icons just aren't going to work for some people. I don't fault them for it. Like I said, it's a trade-off.

It also helped that my partner and I were learning the game together, so I was never in a situation where I was struggling to learn while others blew past me.

Great writeup! It's funny that I was just discussing the recent Race thread about why some people dislike the game with my fiance, and she noted that because we had learned the game together it made it easier to get over the hump of learning the symbols, deck composition, and general flow of the game without feeling like we were getting stomped on by someone who had some experience there already. I think a lot of people who dislike the game because of the complexity of the decision options or the iconography would do well to try learning it together with another new player for exactly this reason.